Mutants vs Designers

Mutants vs Designers
Why startups beat incumbents on product design

Thursday, August 23, 12

How exactly are
startups setting the bar
for design and making
large companies look
like amateurs?


More speciﬁcally...


Why didn’t Intuit build
Mint?


Why didn’t Google
build Sparrow?


Organizational
differences and people


What’s different about
the people?


They’re not people,
they’re X-Men.


X-Men?
• Comic books, man.
• X-Men are mutants, but more speciﬁcally
the next evolutionary step, born into a
world of humans.
• These humans are dinosaurs, a walking
dead blip in the evolutionary line.
• Being a human sucks.

Am I mutant or human?


Well, what type of
designer am I?
• Human factors?
• Interaction designer?
• Visual designer?
• “User experience designer”? (beers on me
if more than two people in the room agree
on what that actually is...)
• Developer? (wait a minute...)

Oh snap. I’m a human.*

• *unless I do 3 or more of the things on the
previous slide. Then I’m a mutant!


To mutants, these aren’t
functional roles.

• They are disciplines.
• Designers do most, if not all of them.


In fact, they do more of
just about everything.


mutants do human
factors work


mutants do interaction
design


mutants do visual
design


what did he just say?


(It doesn’t matter than
you’re not “that kind of


Why visual design?


How it looks vs how it
works is a false
dichotomy


really.


Tesla vs Chevy Volt


Jura vs Keurig


Dyson vs everyone else


AirBnB vs Couchsurﬁng


Etsy vs Ebay


How it looks informs
how it works


mutants write code


WTF did he just say?


Why should designers
write code?


A craftsperson
understands her
medium


Imagine a sculptor who
had never chiseled
stone


Imagine a landscape
architect who had
never planted a garden,
or studied erosion


Imagine a real estate
developer who had
never pounded a nail or
studied building code


A printer who had
never made paper, or


And they simply hand
over a spec for
someone else to make


Crazy right?


But this is what we do


“These people don’t
really exist though...”


But they do.


Ben Silbermann

• Designer
• Developer
• Business/product guy
• Pinterest cofounder (on to new project)
• 19 years old


Our summer intern

• shipped two games to app store
• has his own company of three people
• does all his own visual design
• just turned 15


Everyone future
designer under the age
of 12


So mutate yourself


But mutants on their
own weren’t X-Men.


They were often
maligned, outsiders,
prey.


Until they found
Xavier’s School for
Gifted Youngsters.


This was a special
place.


Computer science,
history, combat...


These new types of
designers, these
mutants, need the right
environment too.


Most Big Co’s...
• Slow
• Deep specialization
• Segregated groups


Startups are different


Speed is king
• no one waits for a spec to write code
• no one waits for design mocks either, or
they generally shouldn’t


Small, cross disciplinary
teams


Environment
• open spaces
• everything is temporal


Designers embedded
with developers, side by
side


Designers
implementing their own
work


X-Men.


uh, cool... so now what?


become a mutant


then mutate your
organization
• Embed yourself with developers
• Provide value to the implementation teams
• Seek open spaces
• Throw out the spec


What if my company
won’t change?


The X-Men didn’t have
it easy either.


Until they found
Xavier’s School for
Gifted Youngsters


Go ﬁnd your own. It’s
out there.


Godspeed, mutants.


Mutants vs Designers

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